


The Cat Among Pigeons

by Deejaymil



Category: Criminal Minds (US TV)
Genre: Friendship, Gen, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Nominated for the 2015 Profiler's Choice Awards Best One-shot, Pack Dynamics, Shapeshifting, Supernatural Elements, Team as Family, Wolf Pack
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-03
Updated: 2015-10-03
Packaged: 2018-04-24 14:17:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,020
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4922824
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Deejaymil/pseuds/Deejaymil
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Spencer Reid is scrawny, awkward and most importantly, he's not a wolf. Hotch thinks it's a bad idea to bring him into their team, but Gideon is determined. When Gideon gets this smug, he usually gets his way.</p>
<p>Hotch has never been quite so glad to be proven wrong.</p>
<p>---</p>
<p>
  <strong>Nominated for the 2015 Profiler's Choice Awards - Best One-shot</strong>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Cat Among Pigeons

**Author's Note:**

> “I have a new member for the team.” Gideon is smug, his self-satisfied expression guaranteed to grate on Hotch’s nerves every time.

Hotch pauses with his fork halfway to his mouth and noodles dangling tantalizingly close to his lips. “Jason, we talked about this. A new team member could have an adverse effect on the team’s dynamics. We work fine as six.”

Gideon leans over and steals a prawn off his plate, popping it into his mouth with a practised familiarity. “This one is different. Give him a chance.”

Hotch sighs and picks up the file that his unit chief has dropped so casually onto his desk. His eyes skim along the profile, eyebrows shooting up into his hairline. “Gideon, he’s _twenty-two_.”

“He’s a genius.” Gideon smirks again, and Hotch fights the urge to thump his head against the desk. There’s no way this ends happily, for _any_ of them.

 

* * *

 

Spencer Reid could possibly push a hundred and twenty pounds, if Morgan shoves him into a pool first. Morgan eyes him warily as the new kid kicks his feet around restlessly, spinning the office chair he’s seated on in anxious half-circles.

“Where you from, Pretty Boy?” Morgan asks him, resisting the urge to snuff in the newbie’s direction. “And where you headed?” The kid has a clever look about him, no doubt a computer tech from up Garcia’s end. Newbie stutters something non-committal before flushing red and looking down at his shoes. JJ appears and tilts her head curiously at the unfamiliar man at her desk, a sneaky gleam in her eye. Morgan meets her gaze as she pulls a face. They’ve been a team long enough that they hardly need to talk to communicate anymore.

_Who’s the geek?_

“No idea,” Morgan mouths back at her.

The man’s head flickers up and his gaze darts carefully between the two of them, calculating. “You’re both wolves,” he states, hazel eyes widening innocently. Morgan startles. He’s never been made so quickly before. And no one has ever worked out JJ, unless she wants them to.

Hotch interrupts, appearing on the level above them and glowering down with the dark look he only ever gets when Gideon pulls one over on him. “Conference room now. You too, Dr. Reid.”  The skinny man stands and swallows nervously, eyeing Hotch. Morgan wonders if the man can see the wolf in Hotch as easily as he’d seen it in them.

Gideon wanders out of Hotch’s office, his face cheerful. “Welcome to the team, Dr. Reid,” he calls out, and JJ chokes on her coffee. Morgan looks from the bag of bones at JJ’s desk to his unit chief and groans. This is going to be a _disaster._

 

* * *

 

Elle deliberately sits herself next to Dr. Reid on the jet and grins at him with a wide mouth that she knows shows far more teeth than necessary. He looks up from the book that his finger is darting across and stares at her unblinkingly. The hair on the back of her neck stands on end and she fights the urge to turn her smile into a snarl. “Are you actually reading that fast?” she asks, settling for a tense kind of politeness.

He closes the book carefully without even marking the page he’s on. “Is everyone on this team a wolf?” he replies mildly, before flushing red and looking away. Damn. She hadn’t believed Morgan when he said that the guy had made him within five minutes of meeting him, sure that Morgan had screwed up. Now she owes him ten bucks.

Perhaps the newbie isn’t as naïve as he seems. This is going to be fun.

 

* * *

 

“He’s not one of us,” Morgan demands, checking that the door behind him has closed tightly before rounding on the other agents in the room. Dr. Reid is out, no doubt trying to find some sort of real coffee somewhere instead of the sludge they’d been handed in the breakroom. “How are we supposed to work with him?”

Hotch decides to head this off before it begins and stands to glare down his angry co-worker. Gideon doesn’t even look up, humming softly to himself as he flicks through the profile. “He doesn’t have to be a wolf to be a profiler,” Hotch says firmly. JJ and Elle look from one profiler to the other, heads darting back and forth as though viewing a tennis match.

“But in the field? How can we trust him to have our backs?” Morgan isn’t backing down.

“He’s not human,” Elle points out, and reclines in her chair. “Come on Derek, leave the kid be. Whatever he is, he’s _fun_. We need some fun.” She waggles her eyebrows, twitching her head in Hotch’s direction.

He decides to ignore that.

Gideon stands. “He stays,” is his mild retort, and Morgan backs down instantly. There’s no doubt who leads this particular pack.

 

* * *

 

Even without the benefit of pack telepathy, Reid is still aware enough of Hotch’s cues to get the gun from his boss’s ankle holster and shoot Dowd square in the forehead. He’s sitting in the ambulance, one foot tracing a pattern into the dust below and gazing off into the distance. Hotch fancies that he can hear the gears ticking in the man’s head.

“I hope I didn’t hurt you too badly,” he comments, a strange protectiveness flaring up for the messy head of hair in front of him, mixed with sick guilt at the memory of kicking at his agent’s unprotected stomach.

Reid looks up and grins at him. “Hotch, I was a twelve-year-old child prodigy in a Las Vegas public high school. You kick like a nine-year-old girl.” Hotch can’t help but laugh at that, determinedly ignoring the spark of fury that burns in his chest at the idea of someone hurting one of his team. Something burns into the back of his head and he turns to catch Gideon’s gaze. That self-satisfied smirk is back. Hotch locks eyes with his old friend and sighs.

_I knew he’d become one of us_ , that smirk says, and Hotch can’t really argue with it.

 

* * *

 

With their schedules and separate lives, it’s not often that they manage to run together. Elle treasures every hour they spend like this. She opens her mouth to pant and lengthens her stride. JJ’s lightly coloured flanks dip in front of her as she runs. Elle huffs and bounds forward, shouldering her friend gently and nipping at her shoulder, laughing silently as JJ rolls her blue eyes at her playfulness and snaps her jaws back. She can hear Morgan yipping somewhere in the trees in front of them, helping Hotch to flush rabbits from the undergrowth. Gideon pads alongside them calmly and Garcia meanders behind him, sniffing happily at a spray of wildflowers. Normally this would be the time she feels the happiest, a time when she can shed every one of her human worries and fear that the job brings with it and just be a pack. But this time something is missing.

She can’t help but keep checking the corner of her eye, as though expecting to see him standing there ready with a lecture about the local flora and coffee in hand. JJ meets her eyes and, in her expression, Elle can tell that she feels the same.

 

* * *

 

Morgan is too far away to do anything when the unsub turns a gun onto Reid, but it doesn’t stop him from dropping into his wolf form and flinging himself forward in a desperate bid to stop his friend from being gunned down. But Reid moves faster than he’d ever have expected the un-athletic man to be capable, hitting the ground as Morgan slams into the unsub’s spine and brings him down with his teeth inches from an unprotected neck.

When Reid stands, brushing dirt from his pants, he wears an expression of disquiet that Morgan swears he’s seen somewhere else before. His eyes glitter oddly in the uneven light.

The look is gone in an instant, but Morgan doesn’t forget that it was there.

 

* * *

 

Elle is the first to break. It’s a danger of their job, the toll it takes on them, and they can all see the scars she’s carried since her injury during the Fisher King case. They’re not all physical. JJ shudders when she remembers the shaft of shared pain they’d all felt as the knife had slipped through her friend’s stomach, and the sharp confusion on Reid’s face as he’d glanced from one chalk-white expression to another.

When Elle leaves her badge and gun on Hotch’s desk and walks out, it’s not just the job she leaves behind. JJ thinks for the first time that Reid is the lucky one. He can’t feel the hollow emptiness in their minds where their pack-member used to be.

 

* * *

 

When Emily Prentiss joins the team, for the first-time Garcia sees a shred of loneliness in Reid.  Emily’s coat as a wolf is the same shade as her hair as a human, and she walks with the same confident stride. Garcia likes her instantly, is the first to allow tentative contact with her mind when she drops into her lupine form. He watches them as they accept Emily into their fold faster than they’d ever accepted him, and Garcia feels her heart break as he pulls back from them ever so slightly.

 

* * *

 

“Hankel? Tobias Hankel?” Hotch’s voice is sharp and they all feel his raw fear.

“Yeah that’s him.”

“JJ and Reid went to talk to him.” Morgan is already bolting for the door.

They’re barely in the car when they feel JJ’s pain. Too late.

 

* * *

 

JJ is in her wolf form when Emily carefully steps up to her, her creamy fur splattered with the blood of the dogs and her mouth gaping open in a frantic panting motion. She can see the shock thrumming through her friend’s slim body, her hackles raised and ears flat against her skull. Emily hasn’t been a part of their pack long enough to pick up on every nuance of their body language, but the numb buzzing emitting from JJ’s mind is enough to chill her.

“JJ?” she murmurs, trying to radiate calm and moving with careful, deliberate motions. JJ turns crazed eyes on her, blinks once, and slips back into her human form.

“Where’s Reid?” she asks finally, and Emily’s stomach twists.

Where is Reid?

 

* * *

 

They watch him die.

His body shudders into a seizure and he dies in front of them. Foam coats blue lips and his eyes turn empty, then he’s gone. They don’t feel him go, and somehow that’s worse.

When Hankel steps back into the room and brings Reid back to life, he snarls and the viciousness of it could put one of theirs to shame. It’s not a human snarl. It’s not a wolf snarl, either.

Morgan’s mind is empty—it stopped right about the point that his friend stopped breathing—but he thinks for a moment that perhaps Reid’s been spending a little too much time with them.

He doesn’t suspect for a moment that there could be more to it than that.

 

* * *

 

They find him standing next to his own grave. When Hotch reaches out for him, he flinches back and bares his teeth in a soundless snarl. His eyes are wide with fear, and something else unnameable. It’s very much like approaching a wild, maddened animal.

When he finally realizes it’s them and crumples into Hotch’s arms, Hotch can feel the frantic shudders running through the slender body. He thinks for a furious moment that this would never have happened if Gideon hadn’t insisted upon letting the kid join their team.

They’d let him down.

If he’d been paying a little more attention, he wouldn’t have missed it. But he wasn’t, and so he didn’t connect the shudders with the wild eyes and the look of barely holding something wild back. And so, he didn’t realize.

 

* * *

 

Gideon is the next to go and Morgan can see the way that Reid withdraws from them, his face turning closed and blank. There’s a darkness in his eyes that hadn’t been there before Georgia, and none of them know how to reach him to draw him out of it. They gather as a pack, missing the two that had chosen to leave, and one who’d never joined, taking comfort in each other’s presences. This time they’re almost used to the hollowness of losing a pack-mate, but none of them are ready to let Reid slip away as well.

 

* * *

 

David Rossi saunters into their lives as though he’d been there all along. When his gaze falls on Reid seated awkwardly on the edge of the table, his eyebrows knit together in what looks like surprise.

“Since when did the BAU get a cat?” he says loudly with a cheerful grin, and Reid drops his coffee. Rossi realizes he’s overstepped when the room silences and fills with shocked expressions, gazes equally torn between watching him and staring at Reid. Their youngest agent opens and closes his mouth a few times before standing and walking out without a word.

“I take it that wasn’t common knowledge?” Rossi says quietly after a long moment, carding his fingers through his hair in disquiet.

“He’s a shapeshifter too?” JJ says in shock. “Why didn’t he tell us?”

Rossi steps out of the room, quietly wondering what exactly it will take to fix this. Flowers are obviously out, but the kid seems like the type to appreciate a rare book…

 

* * *

 

Penelope is shot and they all share her pain, lessening her own struggle by dividing it among themselves. One of the many benefits of being a pack. Of being a family.

Morgan spends almost the whole week in his wolf form, his dark fur raised in a posture of permanent aggression. When they finally catch the bastard who hurt her, it takes the combined efforts of Rossi and Hotch’s forceful personalities to stop him from taking the man down. Permanently.

Reid stays by her side, as faithful as any wolf, and continues ignoring any veiled references to Rossi’s startling announcement. They respect him by not pushing the issue. When Garcia slips and tears her stitches and Reid reacts just as fast as any of them in getting to her, Hotch does him the courtesy of pretending not to notice.

 

* * *

 

When Foyet attacks Hotch in his home, they’re instantly aware. The man moves quickly. He’s gone before even Morgan arrives on the scene, frantically calling 911 as he desperately tries to stop the gushing blood from the wounds covering Hotch’s body. Rossi arrives and instantly shifts into a brindled-grey wolf, joining JJ in running the streets trying to pick up the slightest scent of the man who’d dared to attack their leader.

When Hotch returns to work, his gait is uneven and they all watch him carefully for signs of the darkness that had taken both Elle and Gideon.

When Reid is shot that same day, Morgan notices with a weird detachment that not all the pain they share is Hotch’s. He wonders numbly at what point Reid had begun to slip into their minds without them noticing.

 

* * *

 

Hotch’s face is grim when he informs them that Foyet is going to make another attempt on his life, and they’re instantly up in arms.

“Not going to happen,” JJ says firmly, crossing her arms over a belly full of unborn pup.

“Hotch, he’s not coming anywhere near you.” Morgan is just as determined.

Reid tilts his head and narrows his eyes slightly. “Maybe we’re going about this the wrong way,” he muses. “If we let him come after Hotch, we can stop him.” His eyes dart about the room, taking in their reactions. “Catch him.” He adds the last comment after seeing the murderous look on Morgan’s face. It’s closely mirrored by Hotch’s.

“He won’t walk into an area teeming with wolves,” JJ points out.

Reid straightens and stretches languidly, eyes coldly determined to end this. “No. So you guys will have to stay back... but he won’t see me.”

 

* * *

 

Foyet doesn’t live to see his trial. Hotch’s panic alarm goes off and they move as one, faster than they’ve ever run before.

They find Foyet fallen by Hotch’s bed with Reid perched on the side and gazing down on the body. Hotch paces nearby, his expression blank. Morgan checks for a pulse without expecting to find one, and doesn’t comment on the neat bite-mark on the back of the man’s neck that had severed his spinal cord and ended his life.

It’s not canine. No wolf has the bite force to partially crush a man’s skull like this.

“He was right,” Hotch says later. “Foyet never saw him coming.”

 

* * *

 

A week later, they gather in the forest to run together for the first time in what feels like months. Hotch bumps his muzzle against his teams’. He’s vividly aware that in this moment he’s alive and able to feel the earth under his paws and his team’s jubilation at being together. He’s grateful, endlessly.

Emily is the first to sense him and she bows forward with her tail raised, yipping to catch their attention. Hotch feels the shy presence in his mind before he sees him. He feels both new and yet somehow as familiar as any of his wolves, and Hotch knows instantly who it is even as the others look about in confusion.

When the stocky cat slinks out of the trees, claws gripping the bark above them and peers down with familiar hazel eyes, Hotch wags his tail in welcome. The cat’s tufted ears flick as he drops to the ground lightly, his thick-spotted fur neatly groomed and his short bobtail held high.

_About time_ , Hotch casts towards the bobcat, feeling the shock and delight darting through the rest of his pack as they catch up to what he and Emily have already realized. _You’re late._

The cat purrs and rubs its head against Hotch’s ruff, twining easily through his long legs. _I’m not late_ , Spencer Reid sends back. _I was here all along._

**Author's Note:**

> **Edited August, 2017.**


End file.
